A Course in Self Sequencing

Students at Mount Sinai School of Medicine can now take a class in which they can sequence and interpret their own genomes.

By Bob Grant | October 11, 2012

Wikimedia, George GastinMD, PhD, and genetic counseling students, as well as junior faculty and medical residents, at Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York City will all have a chance to sequence their own genomes as part of a new class being offered at the institution. Twenty students have enrolled in the elective course, called "Practical Analysis of Your Personal Genome," which will give them access to Mount Sinai's Genomics Core Facility. They will have the option to sequence, analyze, and interpret their own genomes or an anonymous reference genome.

"For precision medicine to become a routine in the medical clinic, we need to train the next great generation of physicians to harness sequencing-driven medical genetics,” Mount Sinai Dean Dennis Charney said in a statement. "We believe that an approach tailored to each individual patient’s diagnosis and treatment, informed by genomic information, will provide dramatic improvements in the quality of care."

According to GenomeWeb, the Mount Sinai announcement follows one from the University of Miami a few weeks back touting its new master's degree in genomic medicine.

No word yet on the class fees associated with the first-of-its-kind course at Mount Sinai.